A Proposed User Centered Evaluation Model for Electronic Government Services in Sudan

Abstract

Governmentstook the opportunity to make use of the massive internet network spread, to enhance and provide reliable services to their citizens, which strategically will savetheir time, reduce cost of accessing the services, improve turnaround times, and strengthen accountability and responsiveness. In Sudan, the lack of user centered governmental services resulted in provision of electronic services which are not suitable for its users propose.The research aims to analysis a model that insures websites services quality before and during development process, to design an evaluation model for the services of the e-government websites suites the intended users and to provide recommend on how to improve the website services quality. Across the evaluation of the E-government websites, many evaluation models exist but few of them focus and take consideration to the user perspective of the E-government and the quality of the provided E-services. In developing this proposed model several models have been observed and selected to be foundation for this research. The model was chosen on their relativeness to E-service user centered approaches. The dimensions of the proposed model were built on Delone & Mclean model. Based on the three main chosen dimensions (information quality, service quality, user satisfaction). Accordingly, after the determination of the main dimensions, the quality factors and their metrics; have been selected from multiple quality models have been observed and selected. After applying the proposed model on Police Traffic, Sudanese’s Electricity Distribution Company and Experiment version of the Sudanese Electronic Portal, the major problems faced the participants were lack of the presented information which led some of websites to be not understandable for its users, consistency of representation and design structures, some service are usable and providing accurate and produced in adequate time. However, in other services the naming of service isn’t clear and ambiguous and how its function compatible for people with disabilities for some websites. After analyzing the results, the websites were ranked according to the international standards, the Traffic Police website rated 53.6%, 66.5% for Sudanese’s Electricity Distribution Company and 55.8% for the Experimental version of the Sudanese Electronic Portal. Hopefully, this research might help the designers in designing e-service and websites, better for the users and helping them to understand the importance of involving end user during design phase.